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| Resurrection Mosaic, St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church, NY. Photo: Mark J. Teleha; Lorain County Photographer's Blog http://www.locophotogblog.com/?p=589 |
This point needs to be made without compromise. Many people today find it difficult to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus. For a number of years, when I was a teenager and young adult, I did not believe it myself. If you find yourself in a place of honest doubt and questioning, then I know where you’re coming from.
But still, regardless of what you or I believe personally, the Church must insist: without the Resurrection, Christian faith becomes something less than Christian faith; Christianity becomes something less than Christianity; Jesus becomes another ancient teacher of spiritual wisdom, whose sayings we can take or leave according to how helpful we find them. But no: Christian faith in the true and full sense of the word presupposes the truth of Christ’s Resurrection. Nothing less will do.
There are two essential elements of the New Testament witness to the Resurrection. First, on Easter morning, the tomb of Jesus was found empty. His body was gone. Second, shortly after this discovery, Jesus started appearing to his followers. He was neither a ghost nor a resuscitated corpse. His hands, feet, and side still bore the wounds of his crucifixion, but rather than having come back from the dead, it was more like he’d passed to a new and glorious state of existence on the other side of death – indeed, he was more fully alive than ever before.
Now, you’re either able to believe that or you aren’t. For my part, I think that faith is a gift that only God can give. If you’re unable to believe in Christ’s Resurrection, but would like to, then the only remedy is to ask God to give you that faith. And if you don’t believe in God but would like to, then your prayer might take something like the form it took for me for some years, “God, I don’t know if you exist, but if you do, then please reveal to me your Truth.”
In any case, I can do nothing standing up here in this pulpit to persuade you of the truth of Christ’s Resurrection by means of empirical proof or logical demonstration. The gift of faith is inherently mysterious; it comes to different people at different times and in different places according to God’s hidden purposes. What I can attempt to do, however, is help prepare the ground for this gift – like a gardener tilling the soil for the seed – by showing the reasonableness, credibility, and plausibility of what the Church believes and teaches.
The late Arthur Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974, addresses this question in a wonderful essay entitled “Preaching Jesus Today.” In presenting Jesus to our contemporaries, he writes, we should start with those facts about him that very few would deny.
First, he proposes, Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet and a teacher, did exist. Second, this same Jesus died by crucifixion. Third – and I quote – “as a result of the career of Jesus of Nazareth there came into history the phenomenon of Christianity, the new movement with its society, its teaching, its rites, its doctrine, its ethics, its impact on the world for better or for worse. This is again indisputable, whatever significance is ascribed to it and in whatever way the causal connection between Jesus and the Church is traced.”
Having established these three historical points, Ramsey proceeds to make some observations about the peculiar character of the Christian movement. “Within this new phenomenon of Christianity,” he writes, “there is a strikingly new valuation of suffering. … The ignominious death by crucifixion … meted out to Jesus is not shame and disgrace: it is ‘good news’, it is of God, it has a victorious character. And for the Christians to suffer is not defeat or tragedy; it has a like victorious character.”
This new valuation of suffering, Ramsey continues, is not a cult of martyrdom or a kind of masochism that values suffering for its own sake. Rather, “it goes with a belief in a divine use of suffering which links it creatively with sacrificial love and with a self-fulfillment within it and beyond it.”
Now, Ramsey asks, what happened to bring such a new valuation about? True, Jesus taught his disciples much about the meaning of his coming suffering and death, but before his death this teaching was lost on them. They didn’t get it. So, something must have happened to create for the disciples the doctrine of Jesus’ death as meaningful and victorious. And this something that happened, Ramsey proposes, was none other than the Resurrection.
The Resurrection, Ramsey argues, transformed the disciples’ valuation of death precisely because it was the Resurrection of the crucified one; the Jesus who came back to his disciples was the same Jesus who had died and who still bore the marks of his sufferings.
“Here then,” Ramsey writes, “is the central point of the history of Jesus. He was not a forgotten crucified teacher. His impact survived, and Christianity came into existence because the Resurrection happened and because it was the Resurrection of the crucified. And … the Death and Resurrection are the events which characterize the nature of Christianity. It is a gospel of life through death, of losing life so as to find it. Thus the Christian’s act of allegiance to the risen Lord Jesus was, and still is, an act of acceptance of the way of the cross.”
The basic thrust of Ramsey’s argument is that the Resurrection of Jesus as reported in the Gospels provides the simplest and most plausible way of accounting for the phenomenon of Christianity in general and for the remarkable and virtually complete transformation of the disciples in particular. The same argument can be made in other ways.
A week ago, on Palm Sunday, I pointed out that the disciples were so afraid at the time of Jesus’ arrest that they forsook him and fled. But then, in the months and years following, their attitudes and behavior underwent a complete reversal. Now, they were speaking out boldly, preaching in the public squares, and bravely facing persecution for doing so. Rather than simply returning to their farms, fishing boats, and trades, many of them undertook dangerous missionary journeys to distant lands where they ended up dying as martyrs for the Gospel they proclaimed. Again, the Resurrection of Jesus is the simplest and best explanation of this wholesale transformation of the disciples’ outlook and worldview.
It follows that the best way of bearing witness to the truth of the Resurrection today is by living lives that testify to the creative power of self-sacrificial love in community. When our life together in this or any other parish visibly embodies the values of death-to-self and service to others, then we begin to show the world not only that Christ is risen but also that he is alive in our midst. And on that basis we invite others to join us and share in this faith, this life, and this love.
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